A Fighter Pilot's Guide to Surviving on the Roads - <AUTHOR> https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-surviving-on-the-roads/ <comment><USER2> > _Not convinced? Okay, go to a mirror and look repeatedly from your right eye > to your left eye. Can you see your eyes moving? You cannot. Now have a > friend or partner do the same thing while you watch them. You will see their > eyes moving quite markedly. The reason you couldn't see your own eyes move > is because your brain shuts down the image for the instant that your eyes > are moving. Experiments have shown that it is impossible to see even a flash > of light if it occurs within a saccade._

When you have your phone in selfie mode, the latency is low enough that it can feel like a mirror. When you move, you see yourself in the camera app move. But if you do the above experiment, you can definitely catch your eyes moving. Then you can shut the screen off and do the above experiment using the screen as a mirror and you cannot. It's a neat demonstration of the latency.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was eye opening (pun not intended) and make me a bit worried as a recreational cyclist - many of my clothes are dark and it seems worth investing in brighter ones.

As a driver, I found that using BGE setting of the side mirrors (it's wider out, slightly overlapping with rearview mirror), coupled with keeping an eye on the road gives me a much better situational awareness, and prevents the need to turn my head in many cases - "Nope, there's a car in my blind spot, not changing lanes yet". It's a minor convenience but really helps with fatigue of the neck muscles, and keep my eyes forward, so I can react if anything happens in front of me. I've been driving BGE for nearly 10 years now, and I feel a lot safer that way. It takes some getting used to not seeing the side of the car, so if you consider doing it, I'd recommend getting used to it on a chill road, before getting on the highway.

[https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/blindzonegla...](https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/blindzoneglaremirrormethod.pdf)

<comment><USER4> >many of my clothes are dark

I've taken so many risks like this when I was using a bike: dark grey coat: check, black pants: check, dark grey backpack: check, black shoes: check. And usually my light (only in the back) is barely visible because of using old batteries and forgetting to change them.

<comment><USER5> Partly, the instinct is about feeling trashy, and having to replace worn-out old junk as it accumulates stains, scuff marks, battle damage.

It feels wasteful to have to discard perfectly useful items, because they look worn out. We all know that black, dark items tend show the least amount of wear, and in the interest of efficient frugality, some of us gravitate toward that instinct.

You look at a white t-shirt, and you know it's going to show pit stains by the end of the year. A black t-shirt might show some white accumulation inside the armpits, but not outside, and you really are only going to have to trash it, once some holes show up. Same with socks.

So too with hi-viz stuff. You just don't want to buy something, and throw it out, the moment it gives a sense of unintended imperfection. It's more an equipment maintenance perspective, than a live, situational awareness point of view. The best equipment is the stuff you have, and the stuff you have is the stuff you keep.

Being a little OCD, but that's what's going on under the hood, from my own perspective.

<comment><USER6> Everything costs money. Everything has tradeoffs.

Safety is no exception. It's all about management of risk. If you seek to mitigate all risk you'll find yourself with even more risk because your bank account is now empty. The internet is great at telling other people how to spend their money so of course everyone will tell you you need the "best" helmet and the "most" reflective jacket, etc, etc.

<comment><USER7> If you don't care about looks, you could just get some reflective tape (the kind used for trucks, e.g. V82). Use it on the bike and helmet and you'll probably be more visible than someone in a fancy jacket. Spending couple bucks on safety seems like a decent tradeoff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Transportation cyclist here. This is a great article, but it only indirectly touches upon one of the most effective tools a cyclist could have: an air horn.

I have an Air Zound air horn and I feel much less safe riding without it. I'll often give a few toots before approaching an intersection to increase the chance that I am seen. And it has probably saved me from some major crashes when I lay down the horn on someone. Many drivers seem to automatically brake when I honk.

The horn is also great for giving bad drivers feedback. Most people who drive poorly around cyclists seem oblivious.

Some drivers unfortunately see horn use as hostility. I have dealt with a few road raging drivers who were very angry that I honked at them. I am pretty certain most of these drivers would be angry with or without the horn, so it doesn't much matter to me. The safety benefits also are far too large even if these folks would not tend to be angry either way.

<comment><USER9> "see horn use as hostility" Of course they do. When people in cars honk at other people in cars, the majority of time it is a sign of hostility. They've been conditioned to perceive the use of a horn as a sign of hostility.

<comment><USER10> Cars need to 2 horns:

A) excuse me/I'm here/the light has changed

B) you are a fucking idiot

<comment><USER11> A) dit B) dah

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Remember, lights are just as much about being seen as being able to see

I cannot emphasis this enough. It's terrible the amount of drivers who think "I can see fine, I don't need to put on my headlights". Whenever I'm driving on open roads (100 km/h areas) I'll always turn my headlights on. Like aeroplanes, I think that anything on the road should have lights on it for visibility.

<comment><USER13> It's actually mandatory in most (if not all?) of the EU. You must have your headlights on at all times.

<comment><USER14> Motorcycles maybe, cars have (by now) mandatory daytime running lights, but at least in Germany for older cars it's not mandatory to have lights on during daytime.

<comment><USER15> I remember that one country reverted its decision for mandatory daytime light for cars because it decreased visibility of motorbikes (for which daytime lights were mandatory).

<comment><USER16> That would be France. The idea is indeed to increase visibility of the most vulnerable vehicles. Motorbike riders behave differently than car drivers, hence it is critically important to be able to distinguish them easily in traffic (we downright suck at evaluating movements of light sources compared to solid objects). This is also a factor as to why always-on daylights are mandatorily placed lower than headlights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not too long ago, I was very close to having a "constant bearing, decreasing range" (CBDR) accident that the article is talking about.

I failed to slow down adequately to a T-junction and almost drove straight in front of a truck, despite having looked in that direction _twice_ before entering the intersection.

I'm pretty sure my vision was (partially) occluded by the corner pillar and/or a snow pile on the side of the road and therefore tricking my brain exactly as the article describes.

All it takes is a change in speed to avoid this accident. I now take extra caution in these situations, especially T-junctions or 4-way intersections without traffic lights.

<comment><USER18> I drive a Honda Element. The A-pillars are huge and cover a ridiculous percent of the field of view. "Constant bearing, decreasing range" ought to be printed on the side mirrors, or perhaps it should have been named the "Honda CBDR". (Note: I love the car, this is just one of it's few less-than-perfect attributes.)

On certain left-curving roads it's possible to drive 10 - 15 seconds being unable to see _anything directly in front_ of you.

I compensate by bobbing and weaving to look around the A-pillar at every intersection or when passing. Maybe it even makes me a safer driver because there's no illusion - I _know_ there's a lot I can't see so drive accordingly.

<comment><USER19> My biggest fear of driving a modern car is pedestrians and cyclists hiding in the think A pillar when turning. I am also doing the bob and weave like a prize boxer to make sure things don't escape my vision. I'd much rather run into another car than a pedestrian since at least vehicle collisions are a fair fight.

I'm so much more comfortable when I drive my vintage car. The greenhouse is massive, so you can see everything without even turning your head. I also drive that car much more consciously since it requires real effort. The trade off is if I ever run into anything I'm under no illusions about the safety it provides (which is none)

I can't wait for A pillars that are screens so they become invisible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting read, up until this point.

"[As a cyclist], look at the head of the driver that is approaching or has stopped. The head of the driver will naturally stop and centre upon you if you have been seen."

Please, please do not rely on this. Correlation is not causation, a driver's head might face your direction for lots of reasons (focusing on something behind/in front of you, spacing out, looking at their phone, etc). Friends and family have been bitten by this 'trick' before, thankfully not with deadly consequences. When someone's head is facing you, it does not mean they see you.

A little surprising to see this advice in an article that's mostly about the eye being fallible.

<comment><USER21> It's not just the face, I always aim for eye contact.

But also as they say in the article it's about judging risk. If the face is towards you you're very unlikely to be in the peripheral vision, so there is a good chance the driver saw you.

<comment><USER22> > It's not just the face, I always aim for eye contact.

I do the same. It failed me once though: a young woman in a SUV was looking me in the eye and drove forward; I managed to stop in the last moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Relevant Twitter thread: "You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?"

[https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1014267515696922624](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1014267515696922624)

<comment><USER24> Easier to read here: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is sound advice.

The only time I've made contact with a moving car as a cyclist was when I was going past an off-ramp.

The weird thing was that I thought the driver "saw me". It was late morning, no problem with visibility. From my POV, she was looking right at me. In fact, she was looking "through" me. She simply was expecting other cars and a person on a bike was not what she was looking for.

Human attention is very much selective. Check out this shocking video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo)

After that, I ride with a bright flashing headlight at all times, even daylight. It gives some measure of protection, I think.

<comment><USER26> Off-ramps exist on separated-grade highways, which by definition exclude bicycle traffic. What were you doing on such a highway?

<comment><USER25> Not sure If I understand the exact traffic engineer definition of "off-ramp" but I was going straight on an urban street that the off-ramp exited onto.

FWIW it was here..[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-76.6312124,3a,75y,1...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-76.6312124,3a,75y,186.8h,88.78t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s6agwYLfVYPRBz3eV8wSbVQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The part about the eyes not focusing near the pillars makes so much sense.

I've often griped about how hard it is to see out of modern cars with thick airbag-equipped pillars, but still wondered how I managed to "miss" something that clearly cannot completely hide in an A-pillar. (eg, because the pillar is diagonal, the pedestrian's head or feet or both will still be visible even if their midsection is obscured.

I used to commute through an area with an endless sea of stop signs, which almost NEVER had cross traffic. My car had a rearview mirror that came down too far and tended to block part of my view forward and to the right, and sometimes pedestrians or cross traffic would 'hide' in the pillars. It's one of those things where, if there had been no stop signs, I would have been much more likely to notice cross traffic, but having to look at the sign and stop line takes your focus for that last 2-3 seconds as you slow to a stop, so even if you're "sure" you scanned for peds/cross traffic, maybe once every 6 months I would begin to proceed and then suddenly see the movement of a vehicle or person in my peripheral vision.

Those pillars and the rearview mirror didn't block what i was looking for, but they must have cued my eyes to not look 'too close' to them. Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER28> This advice should be part of driver's ed curriculum.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a former pilot wannabe I do apply a similar set of practices and they do work wonders.

Some other tips I carried over from training:

\- Don't look at bright lights at night, look slightly off, for two reasons. First retina persistence will occur somewhere in your (larger) peripheral vision, rather than in the small hi-res patch of your retina that is critical to conscious sight. Second we are naturally driving towards where we look, and lights are especially alluring. This is also valid for obstacles (static or moving), don't look at them, look past or next to them, ideally away from the direction of their movement (which is, as hunters, counterintuitive and unnatural). This can save your life (and has for me).

\- Always perform pre-flight checklists, both metric, visual and tactile. This is about checking the usual fluid levels (brakes are obviously key) and tire pressure (don't be fooled, a slightly deflated tire can be invisible to the naked eye or touch yet still be dangerous) but also inspection of wipers, tires (tread and sidewalls) and wheels, brake discs, car underside, pedal feel, turning wheel behaviour. Look for evidence of leaking fluids, wiggles, wear, uneven surfaces. Don't hesitate to use touch. Pilots routinely manipulate parts of their planes such as flaps to check they're in no obvious non-working order.

\- Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. A properly maintained car emits basically no unusual noise. I can't count the number of people who have undue noise in their cars. At the very least a noisy car is an inefficient one! Plus even if the noise is due to a harmless cause, it can cover other noises that hint at more serious problems.

\- Respect the flow. It is critical to act as if traffic is a fluid, and anything that disrupts the flow creates perturbations, which means more chaos (hence less predictability) and increased risk of collisions. Think of those beautiful fluid dynamics simulations and what happens visually when you disrupt the flow at the edge, in the middle, introduce a narrow point or a second inlet mid-stream.

\- Be humble: don't text (you're not looking at the road), don't phone (you're context-switching to a virtual space with the person you're talking to, not _in the car, driving_ ), don't drink (even a slight drink slashes reaction time by serious amounts, possibly by orders of magnitude).

\- If at all possible, take extra classes on a track to experience vehicle behaviour near, at, and above its limit in various situations. This will help you in recognising when you're approaching the limits outside of controlled conditions and backing off in the safe zone. Don't be fooled by the fact that taking such a class makes you magically able to recover from, say, an uncontrolled spin though: again, be humble.

\- Your body is constantly lying to you. As mentioned in the article, visual perception is a tricky thing, and other senses can be deceptively abused[0]. Some may appear with reduced frequency due to the vastly reduced amplitude of degrees of freedom in a car as well as visible cues compared to an airplane, but situations may happen where those axes are involved (cars do tilt along all axes!) or visual cues are lost (heavy rain, fog, night). Be aware of that, and combat that with failsafe cues and training.

\- The OODA loop[1] is a thing that works well when driving, leading to anticipation, but needs practice to be leveraged in emergency situations. So, practice it regularly in safe situations, and neural plasticity will carve the required neural pathways to operate efficiently under more stressful conditions.

As with the helmet example, the ultimate goal is to _avoid collisions altogether_. You're driving several metric tons of metal at unnatural speeds. Unnatural as in: as low as 50km/h a brutal shock has a non-trivial chance of outright ripping your aorta to shreds, and driving an armor-clad, comfortable wheeled machine can't change that. As with most catastrophes, many dramatic events on the road are not due to a single root cause but death by a thousand cuts, some more aggravating than others.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_illusions_in_aviation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_illusions_in_aviation)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop)

<comment><USER6> Expecting the general population to do a pre-trip more involved than "yup, my tires don't look flat" is a recipe for disappointment. It's also not efficient. Mechanical failure causes a negligible portion of road accidents and the overwhelming majority of those only affect the vehicle that had the problem.

<comment><USER16> Indeed. People expect cars to be appliances. Sadly they're not.

I'm not talking about mechanical accidents such as a tyre popping though. I'm pointing out that the guy on a B road entered a curve, failed to account for the clues that grip was closing in to limit due to underinflated tires, looked into the approaching headlights which were blown up by its dirty windshield, blinding him, pushed the brakes which further reduced grip both front (due to wheels being turned) and rear (due to weight relief), misinterpreted the car reaction due to loss of visual information and overcorrected, throwing his car into a spin, and crashed into the incoming car.

Change "car" to "plane" and you get a thorough investigation pointing at the chain of events that led to the crash, but somehow with cars society accept it as normal, the go-to explanation generally being "he drove too fast", skipping all manners of root cause analysis. But hey, it's more efficient to lay out speed traps and reduce speed limits (both having proved to be inefficient long-term) to satisfy lobbies of crying families hit by careless people and looking for an easy scapegoat. Plus it rakes in cash like nothing else. Speed† being a byproduct of movement, as long as you have movement you have a risk of collisions, so the rhetoric can be recursively applied until we reach perfect standstill; interestingly enough, some other means of travel proceed at much higher speeds yet are statistically much less dangerous, because training, procedures, infrastructure design, and maintenance.

† Speed _does_ have consequences, due to simple enough energetic calculations. Nonetheless "speed" is not a _cause_ , it's an effect.

<comment><USER29> > But hey, it's more efficient to lay out speed traps and reduce speed limits > (both having proved to be inefficient long-term)

Are these measures ineffective or is reduced speed ineffective? (When the goal is to reduce fatal or serious accidents.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Take the fighter pilot thing with a grain of salt. Some of this stuff belongs more in the sky than on the road. The mirrors thing is a good example. Fighter pilots seek to reduce head movements. During g and/or turns, turning your head can lead to disorientation, even nausia. (It is about the little canals in your ears.) That isnt an issue on the road. Dont try to reduce shoulder checks.

The focus on being seen is also something to think about. Google "target fixation". At night, drunks tend to drive towards bright shiny things. Airstrips amd cockpits use this to hold a pilots attention. There is something to be said for staying hidden, or at least not relying totally upon cars seeing you. Better to stay where you cannot be hit in the first place, and actively avoid cars. That might mean not riding with traffic approaching from behind, or not trusting that if they see you they will avoid you.

</comment><comment><USER31> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422378)

</comment><comment><USER32> In the past at a dangerous junction with limited visibilty owing to corners and high speed traffic I found myself looking one way then the other repeatedly before moving. Now I look to one side until I'm certain it's free I look the other way and if I see nothing, I go. It feels like I'm fighting my instincts but so far so good!

<comment><USER33> In this situation, I learnt (driving school in France) to first look to the left, and once it's free then look to the right. If it's free, go.

I have to admit I don't remember the explanation I was given then but it made sense, and as far as I know everyone's taught to do that here.

In a car or on a bike, it doesn't matter. You also do that at pedestrian crossings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> >... when passing junctions, look at the head of the driver that is approaching or has stopped.

That doesn't really work any more with the steeply sloped windows of contemporary aerodynamic vehicles. All you see is a reflection of the sky. If the vehicle has tinted rear windows you don't even have a chance to see a silhouette...

</comment><comment><USER35> I've done the whole "where the F did that guy come from? I totally looked" more often recently

Does it get worse with age?

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks like this is from 2013, but still a good read.

<comment><USER37> There's still bikes and cars on the road in 2018!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> To mods: A complete aside, but I posted this yesterday (say 30 hours ago) not today.

is this some reset for labour day or other deeply cunning ranking algorithm? Or maybe i fat fingered it ...

<comment><USER38> This has happened before to a submission of mine, IIRC it was explained that it's a manual reset by the mods to give an interesting submission a second chance.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you, could easily be that.</comment></comment></comment>


When Your Customer is Your Competitor: The Return of Roll Your Own - <AUTHOR> http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/01/12/roll-your-own/

<comment><USER2> I know it seems obvious, but determining when to create your own tech instead of using or extending existing solutions is tough. Even tougher given the tendency of people to think their situations are unique instead of being "just like situation X with Y added."

I mean, how many times (to beat a dead horse) have you seen someone say "I wrote my own framework because <insert contrived scenario that other frameworks have solved or are easily extended to solve>".

Yes, sometimes your situation is so unique you need to role your own solution. Chances are it's your ego talking instead of common sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but then there are situations like Rails, where 37 Signals could have built their apps using existing tech, but said 'there should be a better way'. I mean, if you told someone "I'm building this project management app, and I'm going to take an esoteric language no one knows, and write an app framework from scratch" they'd rightly tell you you're crazy.

Most endeavours that start like that end up as failures, however without these attempts tech would stagnate.

<comment><USER3> If one _were_ to set out on such a path and accomplish the goal out of hobby or desire to learn a new language, or for whatever reason, how long would something like that take? How long did it take 37s to build ROR? How long did PHP take?

I'm just curious...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: When is the best time to trademark a product name? - <AUTHOR>

My app's name is close / same as another app name from a bigtechco. However, upon checking the USPTO database, the latter's app name hasn't been registered (pending or otherwise). Is it a good time to spend the resources (even if tight) to apply for the trademark even before launch (i.e. not sure if you are going to succeed)? <comment><USER2> If they're already on the market you are basically acting in bad faith. I suggest you find an original name for your application.

<comment><AUTHOR> While the names are similar, they are 2 different products.

<comment><USER2> Ah, ok, that's different. A trademark has 'scope'. The right time would be when you've settled on a name, before you invest into marketing that name to the general public.

Any point after that and you might be too late...

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: Consult an IP lawyer or patent attorney

Scope typically applies to specific industries.

To the original poster, you do risk legal action - even if you have a registered trademark and they don't. They probably have a common law trademark (which does not need to be registered) that predates yours.

<comment><USER2> That's a good point, and since the OP uses the word 'app' for both products I doubt that there would be enough distance to avoid confusion.

Registering a trademark in bad faith is not going to end well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


React in Patterns - <AUTHOR> https://krasimir.gitbooks.io/react-in-patterns/content/ <comment><USER2> There is another awesome gitbook, React in Depth[0].

[0]: [https://developmentarc.gitbooks.io/react- indepth/content/](https://developmentarc.gitbooks.io/react-indepth/content/)

<comment><USER3> curious about the explicit true and false in one of their code examples. any good reason for that?

// dispatching an action based on state change componentWillUpdate(nextProps, nextState) { if (nextState.open == true && this.state.open == false) { this.props.onWillOpen(); } }

<comment><USER4> Do you mean instead of using !nextState.open and `this.state.open`? Reads a little easier to write out the booleans in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great. Everyone says react is easy and can be learnt in a day, and the docs/tutorials definitely make it feel that way. But then when you actually go to use it there are a bazillion funky patterns using new-ish es6 patterns and operators, and by the time you've implemented them they are outdated and no longer best practice because apparently there's a better way now. So this list is useful.

<comment><USER6> I equate learning any new domain as going into a zoo. You look at each animal on its own and you can learn about difference between animals. You can complete it reasonably in a weekend. But going into wild wild forest is entirely another. (If you are interested, I wrote about it here: [https://jjude.com/are-you-learning-a-new-domain-visit-its- zo...](https://jjude.com/are-you-learning-a-new-domain-visit-its-zoo/))

I learned React reasonably quick. But when I started writing production application, I got into so many cases which were not covered in introductory materials. I found answers to some of these cases via google; I had to find answers to many others by trial and error.

That is why people sharing these type of patterns helps. We all become wiser before getting into wild forest.</comment></comment>


RedBull's Stratos Stunt - Where RedBull failed to Capitalise - <AUTHOR> http://amyshirateitel.com/2012/10/16/redbulls-stratos-stunt/

<comment><USER2> The article started off a little strange with "it was a just an elaborate publicity stunt", but makes some really good points further into the article. It does seem that by not explaining more about the science and just what Felix was attempting created a 'flash in the pan' type event. I think more people saw it as an elaborate stunt rather than anything scientific, relegating it to passing conversation at a dinner table than the history books. It will be interesting in 5 years to see if anyone remembers this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course it's a marketing play. Why else would a company willingly commit large sums of money to a completely unrelated business venture. And anyone who was watching the feed before and after the jump will know they did do plenty of back-story on Joe Kittinger and his original mission.</comment>


Elon Musk may build Hyperloop test track in Texas - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30849171

<comment><USER3> At this point I've read 2 stories that had little to nothing to contribute past those two tweets that Elon Musk wrote. They don't even link to the actual tweets so that I can read what other discussion might have happened/click the link that he has in his second tweet.

These types of stories are extremely frustrating, they're basically TMZ for tech. I feel like there are very few publications that are willing to publish real stories any more, not just the minimum work that will get clicks. I used to think the BBC was one of them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Elon should partner with China. They have 10,000 miles of high-speed rail and a maglev $1.2b 19 mile maglev. The distance between Beijing and Shanghai is 800 miles, which would be perfect for the Hyperloop.

Building the first one in China then the second in the US would be faster than building the first one in the US.

<comment><USER5> Rushing technology development opens up for increased possibility for failures or mistakes. There's no rush to develop the Hyperloop.

<comment><USER4> It could take 10 years or it could take 20 years. Wouldn't 10 years be better for everyone? China has a "can do" attitude. We seem to have a lot of obstacles in the US. Attitude is definitely one of them. The Manhattan project and the Kennedy moon challenge couldn't be done today. A skunkworks methodology goes a long way:

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works)

<comment><USER5> The way it seems to best get things done is have an economic benefit that competes with the status quo, and then those who control mass amounts of money will put their money into it to then gain long-term via profits - <USER2> unfortunately then makes the cost higher that would otherwise be lower if it was government-people funded first.

<comment><USER4> Yes that's why I gave you China's motivation. It would connect their two largest cities and China is a big believer in high-speed mass transit.

<comment><USER5> Good point. China has money to spend in comparison to the U.S. - most of the money the U.S. has spent has been on war, while China's been collecting money from the world. It will be interesting to watch how the landscape shifts in the next few decades.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Revisiting Coroutines (2004) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/MCC15-04.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Given recent discussions of coroutines here on HN (e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16947033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16947033)) this paper might be interesting to some. It has a good overview of approaches to coroutines, relates them to continuations, and discusses some of the uses and issues that arise.

There is an extensive literature on continuations, and they've been more widely studied than coroutines, but they probably aren't presented in a way that is accessible without some background reading. This paper might be a good way to acquire that background.</comment>


Covid-19 Flat-Packed Intubation Protection Boxes – Covidbox.org - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/31/startup-group-works-to-get-flat-packed-protective-boxes-to-frontline-covid-19-medical-workers/ <comment><AUTHOR> We've been working with an amazing group of Doctors and Volunteers for the past week to prototype and produce a flat-packable plastic box to protect medical workers while intubating COVID-19 patients.

We are starting to mass-produce these boxes and would like to get them out to as many Hospitals as possible.

Thanks to Darrell and TechCrunch for covering the effort so quickly!

covidbox.org</comment>


NASA May Unveil New Manned Moon Missions Soon - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/18380-nasa-moon-missions-obama-election.html

<comment><USER2> With SpaceX and their heavy-lift plans in the back of my mind, watching the video made me cringe. When they constantly name-drop the manufacturer of various components it becomes all too obvious who the real audience is. And the message? 'Don't call your Senators, you're still on the gravy train.'

>Work is underway on the flight-qualified booster, getting ready for its big test next year _at ATK in Utah_. [Formerly Morton Thiokol, the company that Orrin Hatch axed the single-segment SRB design to protect. This design decision, and the famed management decision at MT to ignore engineer Roger Boisjoly's warnings on launch day, doomed the crew of STS-51-L.]

>The venerable RS-25 engine, _built by Pratt-Whitney Rocketdyne_ … will power the SLS core stage.

>In order to fuel these engines, NASA called on the expertise _at the Boeing Company_ to build the SLS core stage…

…and on and on.

In this arena cost inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.

</comment><comment><USER3> A base at L2 is interesting. However, I have a fundamental problem with these plans: timeframe. JFK's moon speech was so memorable, and the policy it implemented so successful _because it was aimed to be done while JFK was still in office_ (well, pretty close). Obama and NASA targeting a Mars landing by the time Obama is nearly dying of old age...well, it's not inspiring. It's also not likely to stay on track for so many decades. "By the decade is out" -> "When I'm 78 and elderly"

I am also nervous about the continued approach of establishing bases to "learn more about supporting humans in deep space". The ISS did this for not-deep space, and it trapped us in. It was so expensive that it prevented further exploration.

I would suggest that we should not establish small expensive bases to learn more. Unless the bases are intended to become permanent _colonies_ , which I think would be an excellent move. I realize this starts to sound expensive, but start with a small but expandable design. Like scaling a web start up.

<comment><USER4> Could you do a moonrace in today's America? Would it work? Would we win?

<comment><USER3> Sure. SpaceX or China would win. NASA or ESA would follow about a decade later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kennedy: Let's go to the Moon. We go to the Moon.

Nixon: Apollo canceled. Shuttle born.

Reagan: Space Station Freedom. The Ride Report proposes a lunar base by 2010.

Bush Sr: Space Exploration Initiative, or $500 billion for a lunar base by 2010 or 2020. Rejected.

Clinton: Space Station Freedom morphs into ISS.

Bush Jr: Constellation program and humans on the Moon by 2020.

Obama: Constellation canceled, SLS born. Moon by 2020. Or maybe an asteroid by 2025. Or maybe Mars (with friends). Or maybe somewhere else entirely...

It seems much easier to get agreement on who does the studies and who builds the hardware than where to go and when.

<comment><USER6>
        Kennedy: Let's go to the Moon. We go to the Moon.

        Nixon: Apollo canceled. Shuttle born.

        Reagan: Space Station Freedom. The Ride Report proposes a lunar base by 2010.

        Bush Sr: Space Exploration Initiative, or $500 billion for a lunar base by 2010 or 2020. Rejected.

        Clinton: Space Station Freedom morphs into ISS.

        Bush Jr: Constellation program and humans on the Moon by 2020.

        Obama: Constellation canceled, SLS born. Moon by 2020. Or maybe an asteroid by 2025. Or maybe Mars (with friends). Or maybe somewhere else entirely...*

Elon Musk: Going to Mars!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As another commenter pointed out, it's become rather cliche for NASA to make grandiose plans for 15-30 years out, only to change direction a few years later.

Solve cost-to-orbit, guys. Get it to $100/kilo and we can build a dozen manned stations for the amount of money the country spends on potato chips each year (around $10 Billion)

But enough with the grandiose long-range plans that only serve to allow contractors to bill for a few years until the next grandiose long-range plan.

<comment><USER8> This is because space programs are a great tool of presidential politics, which operates on 4-year cycles that are completely useless for long-term space policy.

Perhaps a solution is to have NASA administered by a board that's appointed for life similar to the Supreme Court -- its total budget will still be subject to the vagaries of political squabbling but at least its ability to allocate budget to programs will be unencumbered.

<comment><USER9> To an extent, this is an oddity of the US system, where a lot of the civil service is run by appointees. In most modern parliamentary democracies, the civil service is largely static and non-appointed, and while the government can in principle get rid of, say, a permanent secretary, it's highly visible and would rarely be done. This tends to give long-term projects more inertia; if the government wants to kill one without considerable controversy, it really has to make a case for doing so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jerry Pournelle has done a lot of writing on the value of offering prizes instead of having the government foot the bill. We've seen some of that with the funding SpaceX gets, but the scale needs to be increased.

Offer $1 billion to orbit an unmanned (man rated) capsule around the Moon. Then another billion to land same capsule. $5 billion to land a crew of two, and return them to Earth. Since each is incremental, the risk for the companies trying to compete will be lower.

EDIT: Yes I know the costs are far higher than the prizes I'm mentioning. It's the general concept I'm aiming at.

<comment><USER11> Google is sponsoring an X Prize to visit the moon before 2016. The first team to land a robot and drive 500 meters will win $20M. The second team wins $5M.

There is also a controversial "Apollo Heritage Bonus Prize" of $1M if a team's robot visits one of the Apollo landing sites.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize>

<comment><USER10> I think the prize needs to be larger to mitigate the risks involved. $20m doesn't seem like enough for the costs involved in launching a droid to the moon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is great news. I'm hoping SpaceX's recent success has put a fire under NASA.

</comment><comment><USER6> Okay, WTF is up with Space.com's website? Takes forever to load on a new iPad, which is usually quite zippy, all the while the entire page appears as a columnar thumbnail sized in the left 1/4 of the screen and hangs out there, frozen, then the entire thing re-refreshes at least 3 times? What kind of amateur crap is this?

</comment><comment><USER13> This article kept going back to this being some secret agreement between Obama and NASA, kept a secret in case Romney won?! Uh, what, why? I understand administrations have different goals, but this felt almost like a campaign piece of "Obama good, Romney bad!" and I for the life of me can't figure out why it matters.

<comment><USER14> I think the point was simply that they didn't want to announce it just before the election, in case Romney would become president and pull the plug on the whole thing. NASA would look rather bad if they had to call it off again in a month or so (despite the fact that it technically wouldn't be their fault).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> But the existing space station in LEO took 10 years to build and cost 150 billion. Wouldn't a similar station in deep space be an order of magnitude more expensive?

Hmm, has anyone considered moving the ISS to earth-moon L2?

<comment><USER3> > Hmm, has anyone considered moving the ISS to earth-moon L2?

This idea comes up all the time on r/space. It can't be done. The ISS is not safe out there. It does not have enough radiation shielding nor is it sturdy enough, nor would you be able to accelerate it out there, etc. Making the modifications necessary to do so would cost much more than just building a new ship.

<comment><USER6> L2 sounds like a big boondoggle to me. It's like the ISS part two. A base on the lunar surface would be able to use lunar soil for radiation shielding. Put a linear accelerator out there to launch things into orbit, and you dramatically reduce the travel costs to get there and back. (Since you won't have to haul as much fuel for return up there.) In addition, O2 can be extracted from lunar soil, which would reduce the return fuel payload to almost nothing.

<comment><USER4> The convenience of being on a giant rock versus a sitting duck in space can't be understated, either. It makes a lot of things a lot less complicated, especially supplying the base. The deceleration and coupling that ships to the ISS have to go through would be completely negated on the moon - all you have to do is land something relatively close (within a few hundred yards, maybe?) to the base and you're set. It's like threading a needle versus hitting the broad side of a barn.

Fuel costs would obviously be greater, but not all that much, and once there is a permanent mobile presence in near space, the fuel cost will really just be relegated to getting from the surface into orbit (which is most of the fuel cost anyway).

The reality (sad, unfortunate, or otherwise) is that getting into space is expensive, but it's ridiculously cheap compared to some of the other things the US wastes money on.

<comment><USER6> _Fuel costs would obviously be greater, but not all that much_

Fuel is just a small fraction of the cost anyhow. Also, you could build "cycler" craft using ion or plasma thrusters that could ferry crew modules from LEO to the moon and back.

 _The convenience of being on a giant rock versus a sitting duck in space can't be understated, either. It makes a lot of things a lot less complicated, especially supplying the base. The deceleration and coupling that ships to the ISS have to go through would be completely negated on the moon - all you have to do is land something relatively close (within a few hundred yards, maybe?) to the base and you're set. It's like threading a needle versus hitting the broad side of a barn._

There's a lot of valuable payloads you wouldn't have to actually land. You could ship frozen water up there in a projectile designed to keep it in a super-cold, super-hard state using liquid nitrogen as a boil-off coolant, and also clad it in armor and partially shield it from impact. Then a rover could go and retrieve the frozen water capsules. Even better, have a few shipments consist of frozen, dampened potting soil, which can be supplemented with lunar soil (made into a slurry with water and sloshed around to wear down the super- jagged edges) and start growing your own food up there with redirected sunlight. (There are a number of plants that are workably tolerant of 2 week sunlight cycles, like peas, provided you keep them cold between sunny periods.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Please help me understand why a nation with a fledgling economy that is trillions of dollars in debt spend billions of dollars on something that was done 50 years ago?

<comment><USER17> There are many reasons:

* Inspiration - the space program was a huge morale booster and directly responsible for a lot of people going into the science/engineering professions.

* Dual-use technologies - most of the problems you end up solving have other uses, from little things like velcro up to ICBM and other weapons tech. Or, you could think of it as giving an alternative to those who want to work on big explody things, but aren't comfortable with them being used to kill people.

* Economic stimulus - those billions of dollars aren't just disappearing. A large amount of the space industry is US based, and that money goes to them and their employees and creates/maintains both skilled and unskilled jobs.

* Scientific research - There are plenty of things we don't know that would benefit from modern sensing or analysis capabilities that weren't available in '72.

* Human progress - At the rate humanity is expanding, eventually we're probably need to gather resources off-planet, whether it's orbiting solar power satellites or asteroid mining, that tech needs to be developed. The longer term goal of actually colonising some place else is also pretty important if we consider progress & survival on a long enough scale.

All of these are I think good reasons why it should be done (again). That's not to say it should necessarily be done by the government, but it's certainly not money wasted in the way people often claim.

<comment><USER18> Most of that are more like myths or are mostly irrelevant for current problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I guess I'm missing the Manned Moon Missions part. Something about an L2 base, the only thing about actual moon missions is something about "teleoperating rovers".

</comment><comment><USER20> Why put multiple cameras in it? Why not just make the center of gravity opposite the camera, so that the lens is always on the top?

</comment><comment><USER21> L2 point is:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L2_point#L2>

<comment><USER22> Actually the image at that link shows the sun-earth L2.

The article and mission is concerned with the earth-moon L2.

Here's a nice diagram of all earth-moon lagranges: [http://www.orbitalvector.com/Space%20Structures/Lagrange%20S...](http://www.orbitalvector.com/Space%20Structures/Lagrange%20Structures/LAGRANGE%20POINT%20STRUCTURES.htm)

Here's a pdf describing missions related to earth-moon lagrangians: [http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/604657main_4-%20GER%20Stakeholders%2...](http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/604657main_4-%20GER%20Stakeholders%20Workshop%20Earth- Moon%20L1_L2%20Bobskill.pdf)

<comment><USER23> You could operate a remote vehicle on the back of the Moon from Earth via relay stations in L2 and L4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Honest question: Why do we want to pay for this?

<comment><USER25> Why would we not want to? It's cheap entertainment if nothing else. As a taxpayer, if you're making $100k gross, your annual contribution for NASA's entire budget is about $100/year. I have no issues with spending $10-15 a year (it's not going to be NASA's entire budget) to see a mars mission in my lifetime.

<comment><USER24> That's a pretty terrible reason, especially when it is mandatory.

Let me put it another way: Would you rather have that $100 going to Mars for "entertainment value" or, oh say, perhaps school supplies to inner city children? Maybe it could be used to pay off the deficit? Perhaps it could go towards cancer research?

Sorry, but the idea of "well, wouldn't it be cool??" I know fascinates many geeks, but I think it's a horrible waste of our money.

If you guys want to see another moon mission, I say pass the tip jar around. You can all contribute. I don't want my money going to this project, at this point in time for our country. I'm not always opposed to this type of endeavor, but this one, at this time? What a waste.

<comment><USER25> > Let me put it another way: Would you rather have that $100 going to Mars for > "entertainment value" or, oh say, perhaps school supplies to inner city > children? Maybe it could be used to pay off the deficit? Perhaps it could go > towards cancer research?

My answer would be the same. You might value those other things more highly but I do not.

I believe that nationally challenging engineering projects pay dividends for years to come in ways that are not immediately apparent when the projects are being funded.

I believe that our future as a country will depend on the number of scientists and engineers we ultimately produce. Manned space exploration is very capital inefficient in terms of science produced BUT it's deeply engaging. It's an entry point that many current STEM workers can cite even if they're not Aerospace Engineers or working in the field.

I believe we should spend money on things that might not work simply because I think it's valuable to have a concrete national dream for the future. It shouldn't be the main thing we spend money on, it shouldn't be a top priority but the money is not a waste unless it goes entirely to contractors and produces no entertainment value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The world is running out of Helium-3!</comment>


Show HN: Skyler - Shop the weather - <AUTHOR> http://myskyler.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, developer/designer here.

Happy to share our new shopping platform: it combines weather and fashion to give you styling recommendations from our collection of hand picked products.

We (team of two) built it on Meteor. Tell us what you think!</comment>


The Great Raft on the Red River - <AUTHOR> https://www.invasiveswatch.org/site/GreatRaft/History.aspx <comment><USER2> This article, linked from Wikipedia's page on the Great Raft, offers a much more detailed and informative discussion of European and Native American interaction with the raft: [https://www.invasiveswatch.org/site/GreatRaft/History.aspx](https://www.invasiveswatch.org/site/GreatRaft/History.aspx)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a better article. I'd have submitted it instead if I'd found it last night.

One interesting fact that neither article mentions but which is mentioned at the end of the Wikipedia article is the impact that the break-up of the Great Raft had on the Mississippi river.

From: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raft#Consequences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raft#Consequences)

 _The removal of the log jams hastened the capture of the Mississippi River 's waters by the Atchafalaya River and forced the US Army Corps of Engineers to build the multibillion dollar Old River Control Structure._

<comment><USER3> Is there a chance it could ever reform naturally ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How can they know how old it was? A 500 year old log jam on the face of it seems implausible.

<comment><USER5> No idea if they knew about this at the time, but you could take the tree ring widths and correlate them with historical records from nearby forests.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your GitHub Failover? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Code locally and wait for Github to come back to commit. Its an annoyance but not super critical</comment>


Show HN: Docker.hostip.dev – Access localhost from Docker on Mac, Linux, windows - <AUTHOR> https://hostip.dev/blog/2020/04/24/docker-made-easy/ <comment><USER2> While Docker is already offering 'host.docker.internal', what is the reason for this blog post?

<comment><AUTHOR> host.docker.internal does not work on a Linux host.

For other OSes the hostnames provided by Docker are inconsistent, i.e. docker.for.mac.localhost

This just provides a cross platform hostname that you can use on any OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A lot of developers are confused about the loopback address (aka localhost). This product name/description seems to build on it and so seems a little cynical?

<comment><AUTHOR> Accessing "localhost" in a Docker container will send you to the loopback address of the container itself.

docker.hostip.dev points to the default bridge network adaptor address which will access your dev machines localhost. It does not replace accessing localhost/127.0.0.1 on your dev machine directly

<comment><USER3> "Your dev machines localhost" is confused - this is unrelated to the loopback. Also "the loopback address of the container itself" \- there is a loopback interface per network node, be it a container or host, different loopback addresses (127.0.0.2 etc) would not change anything.</comment></comment></comment>


Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082 <comment><USER2> I would imagine that it's possible that some of the people reading these comments might already know a lot more detail about Twitter/Facebook bots than this story goes into.

Although you fine folks might remember me from a few other projects, I'm currently a Graphics Editor at The New York Times. We're actively curious and interested in pursuing lines of inquiry about this sort of behavior, and if any HN'ers have any interesting leads or tips, I'd encourage you to get in touch. You can reach me at my username @nytimes.com, or email me and I'll send you my Signal number.

<comment><USER3> I personally have thousands of Twitter accounts I control just for fun; I mostly use them for pranks, though in aggregate there are a few million followers between them (not sure how many duplicates there are, or, ironically, how many of their followers are bots). You can even buy software to create and manage Twitter accounts pretty easily in blackhat forums.

For mine, I scraped a bunch of Instagram pictures for photos, auto-generated a bunch of bios using a few basic parameters, e.g. "Beer lover, proud parent." Names were easy - the most popular first & last names from census records, mix and match. Grab a few lat/longs and convert them to the biggest US cities and you have a location, find some data source to tweet from (breaking news is easiest) and you have a fully automated, human-like Twitter account. For bonus points, Pick a random color toward the low ends of the hexadecimal range ( rand(a..c)++rand(0..f)++rand(a..c)++rand(0..f)++rand(a..c)++rand(0..f) works fine) and you even look like your page is personalized down to the _color_.

Start following random people and 10% follow back (even more if you follow people who are tweeting about similar keywords as you - kindred spirits I guess).

The only tricky part is making sure you don't cross lines with your IPs. You could buy/rent them privately, but you really only want to keep a few accounts (3-5) to each IP, so that gets expensive ($.75/IP/month) when you don't have a really good reason to use your accounts. You can scrape free listings for them, but those are nasty, slow, and can cause bans if Twitter decides to take down a whole range or if you are forced to switch IPs too quickly.

Device type, browser, etc. is easy to spoof.

Should you decide to, it's also really easy to change name, username, and profile picture of an account in the future. So if I wanted a few thousand Trump-supporting (or Trump-hating) sock puppets I could have them today.

If you don't want to buy/create/manage Twitter accounts yourself you can get access to what's called a "panel." A panel is basically an automated, coin- operated network of fake accounts that you can control at wholesale prices. Want 5,000 followers? Plug $1/1,000 followers into the panel, supply the username, and you'll have them in a couple of minutes. Or resell 5,000 followers for $25 and pocket the $20 difference. For example of a panel, see this ad on blackhatworld: [https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-biggest-smm- panel-yout...](https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-biggest-smm-panel- youtube-facebook-instagram-twitter-and-more-90-services.835185/). Nothing special about this one, just the first I found when I googled. They're a dime a dozen.

I'm certain there are millions of fake accounts for every service imaginable.

<comment><USER4> You are one of the reasons why we don't have nice things. Read the ToS and respect them, please.

Thank you.

<comment><USER5> Unbelievable -- "Hacker News" my ass

HN needs more of this type of comments, not less

<comment><USER6> That's also not an argument

<comment><USER7> They don't have to be. They're equal and opposite assertions that cancel each other out so the thread can proceed as it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No kidding.

I remember when I first moved to the Bay Area in 2009, I met a smart guy at a startup meetup, a serial entrepreneur with a previous exit. I asked him what he was working on, and he said "Oh, I've been writing a Twitter bot that will follow people of your choosing, engage them in simple conversation, and retweet their tweets. It's building a network of followers - I don't know yet what I'd do with that, but it's an asset that's likely valuable to somebody." I ran into him again a few weeks later, and he'd sold the company.

I think I'd heard from either him or someone here on Hacker News, around that time, that 75% of Twitter traffic was bots and automated accounts. Note that that was _early 2009_ , before Twitter went mainstream and when they still had a really easy-to-use developer API.

<comment><USER9> I'd believe it. For what it's worth, something like 80% - 90% of all email is spam. It's usually better to leave it there and cordon it off so that real users don't notice it. Spammers don't get feedback that their spam isn't being shown to real users.

Also 350,000 accounts is hardly "massive" as the clickbait title suggests. No way that can account for more than a small percentage of traffic.

<comment><USER10> It's possible that the majority of spam is not meant to be seen by humans, but is instead designed to train spam filters and keep them busy, so some payload still penetrates the shield.

<comment><USER11> I enjoy stories about this, they dont show up here often because its assumed to be a solved problem. But the spam wars continue!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Huh.

The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land line about four years ago after going for three months without receiving a single call I wanted.

It seems the commercial social networks are headed for the same fate. And, they're headed for hardnosed and unpleasant regulation by governments. They probably need to clean up their acts.

<comment><USER13> My cell phone's the same way now. Maybe one in ten calls, at best, isn't phone-spam. And that's _with_ being on the Do Not Call list. I've been trying to figure out a way to do without an actual phone (except maybe a burner on the off chance I need to call 911) as a result. Text is by far the more valuable side of my phone plan, but mostly because everyone wants to use it for auth these days (I could switch to another messaging service for actual communication with people I know)

<comment><USER14> Protip: I moved my legacy phone number (the number you get for customer service calls, that I hand out publicly, etc) over to google voice years ago. It follows me from phone to phone as I move carriers, everybody can reach me, and their "Press one to connect to the phone" feature throws off robodialers very effectively.

The only downside is that google voice smells like the kind of service that google doesn't regard as a needle mover and it's probably a question of when it gets axed, not if.

<comment><USER15> Google Voice has been rolled into Fi now (when you transfer your number into Fi, it becomes a google voice number). I think Google Voice has a few more years in it at the very least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems like a pretty straightforward thing to identify. I remember when the NYT's story, "The Agency", was published [0], some of the fake accounts it had mentioned were still up. Even though the accounts in that story were actually populated by real people, the sockpuppetry was pretty easy to identify. One: the accounts' past tweets right up until they started spreading the news about the fake U.S. disaster were in Russian. Two, all of the tweets of the fake news had almost exactly the same number of favorites and retweets (around 300), and you could see that everyone in that cluster was just retweeting each other.

I'm more fascinated by the spam by Facebook accounts. These show up _all the time_ in relatively popular comment sections, and yet apparently FB doesn't care, or the problem is trickier to automatically flag. For example, this comment [1] is clearly spam...but if you click through to the account, it seems to be a real person [1], with a normal-seemingly friend network, mundane photos of life that aren't obviously stock photography. There are a few junk comments (a bunch of "hi's", but as an outsider, this is what makes FB a lot trickier to analyze, because you don't know how much privacy that user has enabled on their own account.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the- agency.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html)

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/Rr8d3](http://imgur.com/a/Rr8d3)

[2] [https://www.facebook.com/gulfam.raj](https://www.facebook.com/gulfam.raj)

<comment><USER17> I've seen a lot of cases of people's accounts being cloned and then being used to re-friend their friends. I've always wondered a bit about what they are going to be used for and I suspect this is one of the potential options.

<comment><USER18> They will contact the friends list and ask for money because they got into an accident, foreign country, etc. This happened to my wife and her friends, but luckily no one fell for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm just amazed at this entire series of threads. "Gosh, who knew violating social network ToS by proxy and creating massive false consensus networks was so easy?"

Everyone. Everyone should know.

We're watching this terrible trend rip apart the entire social proposition of the internet after spending 2 decades trying and finally achieving buy in. And here y'all are, hopefulls for a digital economy cheerfully defrauding the very networks that will probably bet the monetization strategy for many startups that pass through HN's doors.

The total lack of any personal responsibility here, or notion of consequence... It stuns me.

<comment><USER20> The Tragedy of the Commons states that I am free to exploit this flaw. But we as a society should probably do something about it

<comment><USER19> You are what I am talking about.

You are part of society. Your obligation is not only to find better ways to stop it but to NOT DO IT. We are all free to make terrible choices that hurt others. That doesn't mean we're compelled to do so because, "Welp, I guess that's just how it goes."

<comment><USER20> Easy for you to say when you've had a company of yours acquired for millions.

What about those that are struggling to find a place to sleep, not give our lives up to commuting, and pay our student debts?

What about the Rights Approach to ethics? Don't I have a right to be able to eat?

What I am saying is that we as a society (but mostly the leadership of Twitter) should act to make their service not a Common ground to be exploited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In their recent SEC filings, Twitter estimates around 5% of the MAUs are spammers or bots. They also estimate they have 317 million MAUs, which when you work it out gives around 16.7 million monthly spammers or bots.

Numbers come from their 2016 Q3 filing [https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=15645...](https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-26749&CIK=1418091)

<comment><USER22> I think that's an optimistically low estimate.

<comment><USER23> Why ?

<comment><USER24> It's not possible to be completely sure that 5% isn't a reality-based estimate, but it's typical for services like Twitter Audit and BotOrNot to identify half or more of a celebrity's followers as bots.

For example, as I type this BotOrNot estimates that 34% of @RealDonaldTrump followers, and 48% of @BarackObama followers, are real.

Just from being a nobody on Twitter who uses it almost every day, I'd also agree that 5% is laughably optimistic.

<comment><USER25> They are estimating active users, so it's a little hard to compare to follower accounts. A spam account from 4 years ago that followed 1,000 people and stopped would show up in 1,000 different places despite not being an active user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The question this sort of thing leaves me with is "Why does {Twitter/Facebook/Google} permit this? What are they getting out of it?"

Its pretty clear what the bot guys get out of it, pay to promote services, pay for followers, etc. They can monetize "fame" through the robotic horde. But as this article and ones before it point out, these networks are generally quite easy to spot. So why not take them out?

It probably isn't because they can pad 'subscriber growth' or 'MAU' numbers, they appear to be only small components of that number. And while I could imagine it may be hard to purge them at the moment, its been a problem long enough that _someone_ in engineering must have figured out a system for taking down large numbers of accounts.

The only thing I can come up with, and it is way too tin-hattish to really count, is that it creates an "observable" for the underside of the Internet. By watching what people are asking the twitter bots to do you can observe other objectives that are perhaps less observable. There are some obvious customers for that but I don't think they actually pay for that (except perhaps by buying access to the Firehose)

<comment><USER27> They don't "permit" this. I used to work on anti-bot technology at Google and we put a lot of effort into fighting botting, in particular on Gmail. We were quite successful at the time. Bot controlled accounts went from being a problem that was threatening the viability of the service to being fairly trivial. I don't know what it's like these days.

Anti-abuse teams tend to be relatively small. We aren't talking hundreds of engineers here, we're talking like maybe 10-15 engineers. When you look at the relative effectiveness of different networks, you can be comparing something as trivial and random as whether one or two people happened to figure out a good strategy or not. There is no need for conspiracy theories.

The costs of accounts on different networks is a reasonable proxy for effectiveness at bot fighting. My favourite site has always been this one:

[https://buyaccs.com/](https://buyaccs.com/)

From a quick check it seems Twitter is getting better at it. Prices used to be more like in the low $20/k range. Now the low end accounts are $45/k and if you want PVAd/profiled it's up near $90. Compare to Gmail where the price is more like $280/k. Or Facebook EN accounts, $120. Good to see my old colleagues doing such a good job!

In the case of Twitter, my view is that their relatively low performance on botting is a side effect of the whole social justice / campus politics movement. I heard from a friend who works there that their focus was switched almost entirely to fighting human abuse like people being nasty to each other, political extremism, terrorism, etc. If you remember, just a few years ago Twitter was being attacked in the media for being filled with trolling and nastyness. So of course that became their priority. Anti-botting took a back seat.

Nowadays there's suddenly a bout of anti-Russian hysteria. Suddenly bots are in focus again. There are conspiracy theories about botted accounts being used to convince people to change their political positions. Having worked in the industry for years I am deeply skeptical about this. I never once saw bots being used for political ends or anything even approaching it. There is a lot of disinformation out there about Russia right now from western sources, and a lot of paranoia that doesn't seem to be justifiable.

I'd guess RT does far, far more to create pro-Russian support than anything happening on Twitter does.

<comment><USER28> > From a quick check it seems Twitter is getting better at it. Prices used to > be more like in the low $20/k range. Now the low end accounts are $45/k and > if you want PVAd/profiled it's up near $90. Compare to Gmail where the price > is more like $280/k. Or Facebook EN accounts, $120. Good to see my old > colleagues doing such a good job!

Perhaps there's just more demand?

> Nowadays there's suddenly a bout of anti-Russian hysteria. Suddenly bots are > in focus again. There are conspiracy theories about botted accounts being > used to convince people to change their political positions. Having worked > in the industry for years I am deeply skeptical about this. I never once saw > bots being used for political ends or anything even approaching it. There is > a lot of disinformation out there about Russia right now from western > sources, and a lot of paranoia that doesn't seem to be justifiable.

The fact that you've worked for Google on anti-botting and didn't see the technique you were tasked to counter used for political means might be leaving you biased. Without pointing fingers, I just want to state that there's tremendous political opportunity in spreading misinformation via internet (via any media really), it's amazing that in 2017 this isn't clear for _everyone_.

<comment><USER27> My experience was that prices never really changed unless the difficulty of creating/keeping accounts went up. Demand was pretty stable over time, only supply changed.

And yes, of course my experience of what bots were used for left me "biased" as to what they're used for. How is actual experience bias?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not surprised. This has been a phenomenon for a very, very long time [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11905266#11906591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11905266#11906591) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9170433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9170433) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485659) [4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525638) [5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5501654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5501654) [6] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5996790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5996790) [7] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833188) [8] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346386)

</comment><comment><USER30> I think this story is getting more coverage than the one from a few months ago that showed that, for instance, both Clinton and Trump had _millions_ of fake accounts following them:

> _Per eZanga, 4.3 million—or 39 percent—of Trump 's more than 11 million > Twitter followers as of August came from fake accounts while the other 6.7 > million are actually real users. And for Clinton, 3.1 million—or 37 > percent—of her more than 8 million followers were fake while 5.3 million > come from real accounts._

[http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/more-third- presidentia...](http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/more-third-presidential- candidates-twitter-followers-are-reportedly-fake-173628)

350,000 is about 0.1% of Twitter's user base. Does anyone here think the number of fake accounts isn't orders of magnitude higher than that?

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone on twitter could've told you that. When you're followed by "@hotttladie3" & "hotttladie453892", it's only reasonable to assume there is also an @hotttladie4 through @hotttladie452891.

The problem with having a user reporting based plan for acting against fake accounts in an environment where the psychological motivations of using the service, if not to disseminate news, or maintain a closet standup comedian habit, is affirmation. In almost every motivation for using the service, the user has an incentive to keep their numbers up, whether they are real or not. A huge part of the game is the number of followers.

Personally I'm just surprised that they've moved from advertising cam sites (which could conceivably act as a secondary, almost passive income) to quoting star wars novels while inflating numbers for people who pay for followers. That's the aspect that confuses me, and makes me feel vulnerable.

<comment><USER32> Which part of that confuses you? If it was the quoting SW part, my understanding is that they used that as a simple source of human language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> There was a "Ask HN:" post about Twitter bots the other day: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497235)

Strange that these bots aren't spammy but are posting every minute or two. I wonder what they're for...

[https://twitter.com/superpolice001](https://twitter.com/superpolice001)

[https://twitter.com/superpolice002](https://twitter.com/superpolice002)

[https://twitter.com/superpolice003](https://twitter.com/superpolice003)

<comment><USER34> Almost like one of those RSA/Google Authenticator/etc rotating numbers... always 6 characters, seemingly random, somewhat pronounceable. Weird.

<comment><USER35> As it is twitted exactly every 2 minutes it can actually be a kind of current confirmation or authentication code.

<comment><USER36> Dead man's switch?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > A Twitter spokesman said the social network had clear policy on automation > that was "strictly enforced".

> Users were barred from writing programs that automatically followed or > unfollowed accounts or which "favourited" tweets in bulk, he said.

I am constantly getting followed by accounts with tens or hundreds of thousands of follows and followers, usually checkmarked accounts though I've never heard of them. It's painfully obvious these verified users are using bots to randomly follow people, both to spam my inbox with "you have a new follower" messages and to encourage people to "follow back".

But Twitter does nothing about it. It's not "strictly enforced" at all.

<comment><USER38> I have a twitter account but never use it (in fact never tweeted anything). Every few years or so I get curious and log in and, lo and behold, I have 10-20 more followers than I did last time. Not sure if they are fake, bots, random people, who knows?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This has become obvious to me after getting a few blog posts at the top of HN.

I just search for my domain on Twitter, and there are dozens of "people" who do nothing but retweet hacker news articles. They are presumably doing this for some kind of "reverse" reputation.

I'm interested if anyone has any more insight on this phenomenon. Maybe it's as simple as convincing some naive users to follow them with links vetted as high quality.

Examples:

[https://twitter.com/bartezzini](https://twitter.com/bartezzini) (123K tweets, nothing but HN-type links and comments)

[https://twitter.com/EggmanOrWalrus](https://twitter.com/EggmanOrWalrus) (15.7k tweets, ditto)

[https://twitter.com/MarkBeacham](https://twitter.com/MarkBeacham)

</comment><comment><USER40> UCL has dropped the ball on marketing itself. If this had been a student at MIT or Harvard, the article headline would have started with "MIT/Harvard Researcher ..." instead of burying the school's name in tiny print in the middle of the article.

<comment><USER41> That's true for most universities. Some universities get billing in the headline, most do not. This is not a function of the press department, but about the editor's perception of the public's perception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Bot accounts, not fake accounts. I don't even know what the latter means—plenty of people don't associate twitter with their real name. And why would you!

Secondly, of course there are this many. There are probably many more. I run several bots myself; there's nothing wrong with this.

Twitter's TOS is only as good as its enforcement, and if there's anything twitter is terrible at, it's having any control over its community.

<comment><USER43> "Fake" implies deception: it's fake because it counterfeits or forges something else that is real.

An anonymous or pseudonymous Twitter account run by a human, in the way that a human is expected to use a Twitter account, is not a fake account: it's real, just pseudonymous. A bot account that's clearly a bot, like @big_ben_clock or @choochoobot, isn't a fake account either: it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is.

From the article: "These accounts did not act like the bots other researchers had found but were clearly not being run by humans."

One thing a network of fake accounts could be doing is inflating follower counts. A follow from a pseudonymous account that corresponds to an actual human isn't fake. Even a constant factor or constant term from a small number of humans with multiple accounts isn't particularly deceptive. But thousands or millions of follows from accounts run by a handful of humans is deceptive.

Another thing a fake account could be doing is spreading propaganda by creating the impression that many people agree with a political opinion, when these "people" are just canned responses, or humans assisted by automation (but capable of making human replies across large numbers of accounts).

<comment><USER42> Deception is a great feature. Why is that bad? I don't want Twitter to know my name. Don't exclude me for valuing my own privacy! I'm certainly not "fake", and neither are my interactions.

<comment><USER43> I'm not sure how you got that interpretation of "deception" out of what I said. You're not fake, and I'm not excluding you. You're just also not deceiving. I certainly don't think your real name is Dgfgfdagasdfgfa.

To repeat what I posted: _An anonymous or pseudonymous Twitter account run by a human, in the way that a human is expected to use a Twitter account, is not a fake account: it 's real, just pseudonymous._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Twitter has become unbearable to use for news. Every single submission from news stations to President Trump is filled with combo-replies from people. 1 dude will bombard the tweet, then a chick, then a different guy.

Example: [http://i.imgur.com/zbyM7YG.png](http://i.imgur.com/zbyM7YG.png)

You need to scroll down at least 5 load-more's to see regular people tweets. It's a really terrible user experience that Twitter needs to solve.

<comment><USER45> >You need to scroll down at least 5 load-more's to see regular people tweets.

I personally don't find much added value in those tweets, "regular people" or not. They're basically YouTube comment level at this point.

<comment><USER32> And it was at this moment andai that realised, that YouTube comments are written by regular people.

<comment><USER46> Oh really? I've seen a lot of bot like activity

<comment><USER32> I meant (with a great sadness in my heart) that YouTube comments do indeed come from relatively ordinary members of the human species.

I might be wrong, but I don't think we can simulate flame wars yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I remember hearing about this radio host who was competing with another host to get more followers. Then over about a week one of his fans who owned a bot net gave him 100k followers. He sent a DM saying "you're welcome, enjoy".

He already had about 250k followers so it wasn't a huge spike in that context but it was interesting to think of the implications of that when you come across a random account with 100k followers and 100 following... they might not be as influential as it seems.

Also this was about a year ago and last I checked his follower account was roughly the same.

Wasn't there a story on HN about a guy who created a fake identity and twitter account with 20k followers and got invited (and paid?) to speak at a tech conference?

</comment><comment><USER48> Twitter says 5% of their MAUs are bots but this surely an underestimate. Facebook estimates nearly 9% fake users which is also likely too conservative. Bot traffic in ad fraud is even higher (30+%? every study is different, seems difficult to measure).

So we have 5-9% as a lower bound and perhaps we can look at e-mail for an upper bound with nearly 60% spam by volume.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is this really a surprise?

I don't even use Twitter, and I have 4 different Twitter accounts. The amount of fake accounts must be staggering, but there's no way Twitter will cull them otherwise their MAU numbers will tank, and along with it, their ad rates, etc.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is a great way to spread fake news and get people to see it/engage with it.

<comment><USER32> Don't know why you were downvoted, as this is one of the most important uses of bots.

Maybe people are sick of hearing the term.

There also seems to be some confusion about its meaning and its purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> \- messages being posted only from Windows phones

The smoking gun. What real person still has one of those.

Disclaimer: I owned a Nokia Lumia 920 for > 2 years.

<comment><USER51> Maybe the OAuth token for a popular WP app got leaked, and now anyone can authenticate with it?

<comment><USER52> All OAuth tokens, even the official ones, are leaked at this point. Google them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It is trivial to create a BOT type twitter account.

1\. Get burner email and phone number

2\. Post bot to DO, AWS or run it on a raspi

3\. ???

4\. Profit from all those sweet followers.

Many of them look entirely "real" or they can be hilariously obvious. I would bet it is happening on Facebook, Instagram, Snap and any other social network where "value" is derived from followers/eyeballs.

</comment><comment><USER54> The only surprising detail here is the small number mentioned (350K).

Twitter fake accounts are expected to be counted in MMs.

</comment><comment><USER55> if youve not read it already, here is an excellent interview with Andrés Sepúlveda who has helped to "rig elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade" partly through using twitter bots and similar techniques. [https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an- elect...](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/)

</comment><comment><USER56> Anecdotally I've seen a huge uptick in spam/bots following my main account on Twitter since the beginning of the year. Probably 50%+ of my new followers have been accounts with no profile picture, no tweets, and close to zero followers.

</comment><comment><USER57> Everybody talks about bots but let's not forget that there are plenty of bot- like accounts controlled by humans from poor countries for (fractions of) pennies. You don't need a "hacker army", just a couple of bucks and a third- world nation with good enough infrastructure. Look up "click farms".

The problem with this is that while bots can be detected (even if doing so is an arms race) it's much harder to detect "bot" humans.

</comment><comment><USER58> this is relevant is as well: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hitwe.andr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hitwe.android&hl=en) tldr: 'HitWe' it's a tinder-like dating app with 10M+ installs on google play (haven't checked itunes). i came across it by browsing dating apps for fun. most of the bad reviews (1-2 stars) are from people who claim it's 95% fake profiles etc. many claim that women there just ask for their email etc. some even claim to have paid some of the women which have then disappeared (but that's being too naive, IMO. never pay someone you have never met.. ). there are many many good reviews, but most are only with 5 stars and without any text (which, to me, is another red flag).

anyway - the most interesting part here is that they actually managed to fool google, up until this very moment! google recommended me to view their app.. spam does work !

ps - googling (ironic, i know) 'hitwe app scam' showed me this on the first result: [http://www.datingbusters.com/hitwe-com-exposed-for-fake- prof...](http://www.datingbusters.com/hitwe-com-exposed-for-fake-profiles- throughout-their-site/)

i am interested in a response from one of google play's spam engineers/managers ..

edit: spelling

edit2: it took me 0.5 secs to start sensing that it's a fake-boosted app. a human reviewer at google could have just scanned the top 100x dating apps in a single day and map out the fake apps. what do you think?

</comment><comment><USER59> Oh, it's a lot more than 350k.

</comment><comment><USER60> Spam was a serious and growing problem before the major providers got serious about filtering. For now I just report clickbait feeds as spam and hope for the best.

<comment><USER32> I thought, "ha, he'd need a botnet to make any noticeable impact", when I thought, has anyone thought of that?

Using a network of bots to detect and report obvious bot accounts.

<comment><USER61> In the same spirit, there is at least one botnet dubbed Linux/Moose [1] dedicated to penetrating home routers for the sole purpose of creating fake followers on social networks. [1] [http://www.welivesecurity.com/2016/11/02/linuxmoose-still- br...](http://www.welivesecurity.com/2016/11/02/linuxmoose-still-breathing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> in '08 or '09 I met a guy who was creating 100s or more accounts and paying an overseas outsourcing company to curate longterm timelines properly (so not just spam)

he genuinely didn't know why he was doing it at the time (he'd been heavily involved in gaming Google rankings previously for credit card companies) and it was at significant cost - but he was completely sure at some point it would be useful

</comment><comment><USER63> Related research paper, "The 'Star Wars' botnet with >350k Twitter bots":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445289)

And another paper covering the topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445295)

</comment><comment><USER64> I get follows from obvious bots (bio: "click here for 5000 follows") very regularly on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Instagram almost always removes the account, Facebook has always responded the account "doesn't violate the rules", and Twitter I'm not sure about, but I always block and report that garbage.

</comment><comment><USER65> I thought everybody knew that a big chunk of Twitter works this way. I got to see it in action just a couple weeks ago with a pro-Trump network of fake Twitter accounts. I had the misfortune of having one of those @TrumpRulesMAGA4Eva style Twitter accounts reply to something I'd written with a standard pro-Trump meme. A couple people liked and favorited within an hour or so and then nothing. Then late on a Saturday night several days later, a whole network of Twitter accounts favorited and retweeted it. Most of them had similar style names but some had generic ones or random character strings. About half had an egg profile picture. Many of the others had tried to look legitimate with real names and pictures of people but tineye reverse searches showed 10,000+ hits on the images. Looking at the histories of the accounts, they'd all been used similarly for months.

</comment><comment><USER66> SoundCloud is full of fake accounts. I get a couple of new followers every now and then and it feels like 95% of them have mentions of "buy followers". I always report spam bots whenever I spot them on SoundCloud, Tinder, Facebook and Reddit, so though I only have very few followers on SC I think all of them are real people at least. It is very important to always report spam bots and other types of disruptive fake accounts and I wish that everyone did. If everyone did then it would be less profitable to run such accounts and then there would be fewer of them and we would be bothered much less frequently.

</comment><comment><USER67> In a time where bots and AI are all the rage, it begs the question: Are some bots on twitter more useful and insightful than actual people?

I remember a twitter bot (name escames me now) which would crawl pastebin and tweet updates when passwords / DBs were leaked. It had lots of followers (security researchers who found it very useful).

Most humans on twitter are boring and waste people's time with youtube style comments. Most bots are spammy and waste time too. Why not allow both and let people decide who they follow/ban?

</comment><comment><USER68> I found it interesting that a Member of parliament on twitter had hundreds of obvious bot followers. I presumed he was buying 'popularity'. Maybe more sinister. Lots of them very recent

<comment><USER69> Hundreds out of how many? I get a fair number of bot followers on an account I don't really care about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> The paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02405v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02405v1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER71> MAUs affect their stock price. MAUs are in their 10k IIRC, does the SEC look into this? i'm not sure.

</comment><comment><USER72> There is a whole industry of buying and selling social media "followers".

So I guess this is a product of this.

</comment><comment><USER73> I thought this was obious to everyone with a twitter account? I get random bot follows all the time.

</comment><comment><USER74> Standard stuff, you want media attention for your blog, twitter whatever? You'll need to have a bot army to upvote your own stuff, relink and like your content.

Having a botnet is now an essential part of building your social media following.

</comment><comment><USER75> On the same topic. I think he might have discovered the same botnet. [http://sadbottrue.com/article/51/](http://sadbottrue.com/article/51/)

<comment><USER50> To me, it seems like a set of QA/test accounts for Twitter to do load testing and whatnot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> hi,i'm Brian, i had my friend help me hack my ex's email, facebook, whatsapp,and his phone cause i suspected he was cheating. all he asked for was a his phone number. he's email is (email@example.com)..IF u need help tell him Brian referred you to him and he'll help. Am sure his going to help you do it, good luck

</comment><comment><USER77> For everything people dislike about curation, you avoid these syble attacks

</comment><comment><USER73> Meanwhile Twitter banned yet another political youtuber @SargonOfAkkad, doesn't seem like he did anything against Twitters ToS. Fed up with Twatter to be honest.

<comment><USER78> Yeah I watched a few of his videos on Youtube. He makes fun of feminists and sjws in his videos, so Twitter doesn't like that stuff and call it harassment or bullying or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> my bots would never be caught up in these criteria. they've been using NLP for years

</comment><comment><USER80> Twitter is broken. No news here.

</comment><comment><USER9> 350,000 accounts is not a "massive network". This is all hype.</comment>


Which MacBook can code 8 hours without charging? - <AUTHOR> iOS dev, in Xcode all day. Looking for a laptop that can code all day without plugging in.
Just bought the 12", shows only 5 hrs? Upgraded from 2012 15" retina which only for me 3.6hrs.
Maybe I should try 13" retina? <comment><USER3> None really. You can extend the life by dimming the display, shutting down applications (including browsers), but if you are coding, compiling, testing and debugging no mac (or really any laptop) will last 8 hours that I can think of. This is especially true if you have device plugged into it for any significant amount of the time.

If I am doing more heads down coding and less cycling through testing etc, my 15" mac retina does ok but I am typically around 6 hours disconnected IIRC, and sometimes as low as 2-3 if I am doing firmware work where I have devices plugged in a lot of the time. Honestly IMO, this is really good and I don't need/expect more then that right now. Right now, with a 99% charge and only surfing HN and doing some reading my mac is telling me I have 10:45 left, but it isn't working much obviously.

EDIT: specifically I have a mid 2014 15" macbook pro

<comment><AUTHOR> I have the 2012 15" retina, but I'm on the road freelancing all the time, so now looking for something light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use a 13" macbook air (fully optioned) for xcode - objc and swift, easily get a day out of it, I'm regularly surprised with "you have only 5% charge left", oh time to charge it. Performance is great, better than my behemoth windows box with C#. I even run a couple of windows VM's on it for other dev work and runs like a charm. The best thing is its so light!

I remember thinking I should get a macbook pro, but glad I went with the air. The only reason I'd consider a pro is if I wanted to do a lot of video work, but then my daughter has my old air and she makes movies with it, though space is sometimes an issue. If it came to that one of those Samsung USB3 external SSD's are dirt cheap now. I know people who run VM's on them over USB 3.

If you want more than one external monitor though it can get expensive - <USER2> need to daisy chain thunderbolt's. USB monitors are possible, but not sure about performance on those. I have an external 27" monitor on mine and works fine, I have recollections of running a third monitor over airplay to my apple tv, but I'd have to check that it's been a while (I use my phone for that now)

</comment><comment><USER5> Are you really coding all day on a laptop with no access to power points? That doesn't sound very ergonomic.

Why not use an external battery pack? [http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/macbook- portable-battery/](http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/macbook-portable-battery/)

I guess you could even hackintosh a Windows laptop that has interchangeable batteries, but recharging both (or even three) on a daily basis would soon get tiresome....

</comment><comment><USER6> Macbook Air had the best battery life I have seen in a laptop but no retina. You can always buy one of these:

[https://www.hypershop.com/products/hyperjuice-external- batte...](https://www.hypershop.com/products/hyperjuice-external-battery-pack- for-macbook)

<comment><AUTHOR> ehhhh, retina is so nice though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What browser? I found that using Safari over Chrome drastically increases battery life.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly safari, and Chrome canary on the side.</comment></comment>